You know that they always say you have to really hit rock bottom to start climbing your way back up again? Well, in 2006, as far as my eating habits were concerned, that’s right where I was.

I was definitely following the ‘throw everything at it and something might stick’ method of weight loss. Having a wedding to plan for hadn’t done anything to help me lose any weight, although I was quite impressed that I’d come back from a three week honeymoon in Canada pretty much the same size as I’d left.

Husband #2 and I were basking in romantic post-wedding bliss…who am I kidding, things were exactly the same as they had been before we got married and we decided that maybe moving out of Soham might be what we needed to make things better. Hooray! Only we couldn’t sell the bloody house. But that’s another story.

I was still working in Cambridge and the job was OK but not very inspiring. At some point in 2006 I think I had to apply for it all over again, thankfully I got it all over again too. I was bored though, pinning all my hopes on moving to Ely where I had access to transport, as living in Soham was still costing me a bloody fortune and H#2 did like to Lord it over me with the fact he earned more, and make me ask him every month for the money for the monthly season ticket. Way to keep the little woman down, eh?

It’s hardly surprising that I couldn’t sort my weight out. And the day I hit the very bottom was a day I remember really well. I was still signed up to several diet websites. I was paying for Weight Loss Resources and Weight Watchers, had all the Slimming World books, and was buying Rosemary Conley’s magazine too. I also obsessed about diets on several other web forums, including the Discovery Health website and the Daily Mail’s Femail forum. I think it’s fair to say that if I had another project or hobby I devoted so much attention to, I might have become quite good at it.

I think it was one day when I was lamenting my lack of success at sticking to ANYTHING that Lou contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in trialling a new way. Another non-diet diet? My interest was aroused, I’d had a bit of respite earlier in the year with Paul McKenna’s ‘I can make you thin‘ but had got really bored with listening to him for half an hour every night and given it up. Out of curiosity I got in touch with a lady called Sue Thomason, who was running a new programme called ‘The Food Philosophy‘.

(Paul Mckenna – I can make you thin)

The programme included a forum (I was becoming quite addicted to them) and six weeks of reading material and exercises. She’d run it for free using members of the Discovery Health website as guinea pigs and was taking on paying clients. I read through the intro text she sent me and I felt like this might be the answer for me.

The programme was a complete revelation. It described me and my eating habits to a tee. The best thing was that it made me feel as if I didn’t have to live like this any more. I couldn’t possibly summarise it here, but after my six weeks were up I was already feeling so much calmer around food. I vowed never to diet again, after reading how the very decision to ‘restrict’ food affects our subconscious mind and makes us want to over eat.

I finally understood WHY diets didn’t work, and that in order for me to stop my overeating, I was going to have to let go of the idea that they did, and my desperate need to lose weight, for good, and start learning to trust my instincts. That building up my self-esteem INTERNALLY and not basing it on what I looked like to others was the key to being able to live a happy life.

I still believe that Sue Thomason is a freaking genius.

So now I had all the facts, it was up to me to change my life with them…